Charles Dickens

It is London.Michaelmas term is lately over and the Lord Chanceller is sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall.It is an implacable November weather.As much mud is in the streets as if the waters had bur newly retired from the face of the earth and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus,forty feet long or so,waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.Smoke is lowering down from chimney-pots,making a soft black drizzle,with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes,gone into mourning,one might imagine for the death of the sun.Dogs are undistinguishable in mire.Horses,scarcely better,splashed to their very blinkers.Foot passengers are jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper and losing their foot-holdat street corners,where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke(if this day ever broke),adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud,stickin at those points tenaciously to the pavement and accumulating at compound interest.